External data storage and data backups are a very important part of any computer user’s data recovery and safety plan. You may not have any important documents on your computer, but odds are you have a slew of digital photos that if lost would be gone forever.

The Acer Alto storage appliance was seen at CeBIT 2009 by the geeks at Engadget and it looks slick. The machine has an Intel Atom N230 CPU inside to control the show and packs in four hot swappable drive bays as well.

Connectivity for the unit is via eSATA or Ethernet, which is nice. I use a Drobo that lacks Ethernet connectivity and have wished for online connectivity more than once. Acer doesn’t say, but with four drive bays and a built-in processor, we can assume that the unit supports different types of RAID for security. No pricing or availability information is available.

Engadget